Results for tag "best-science-fiction-books"

Solitude’s Sequel Multitude Now Available Everywhere Books Are Sold

Multitude, the exciting follow up to my award-winning, apocalyptic novel, Solitude, is now available as both a physical book and as an ebook. R.C. Bray and Julia Whalen are in pre-production on the audio version of Multitude. We’re anticipating a January release for the audiobook.

Following the incredible events of Solitude, Vaughn and Angela must probe the depths of space and time to unravel and perhaps even reverse the enigma of humanity’s disappearance. But first, they must get past themselves. If you enjoyed Solitude, you’ll love the action and plot twists in this epic apocalyptic novel.

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Award-Winning Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Vaughn had visions of plying the seven seas with Angela at his side. Then she and fate crapped all over his plans. Bent on discovering the truth about what happened to humanity and the rest of the world’s life, Angela drags a less than willing Vaughn across the Mediterranean and into central Europe. However, even the overhead presence of a line of levitating steel structures and ships couldn’t prepare them for what lied ahead. The size and scale of what they find in Geneva rocks them to their cores.

Angela and Vaughn fall into the center of a world-consuming machine. While struggling to survive, they wander through a looping chain of utterly alien lands. When they finally deduce the true nature of their situation, Angela discovers a potential way out, not just for her and Vaughn but all of Earth’s life.

Backstory For My Award-Winning Sector 64 Series

For the backstory of my SECTOR 64 series, I put forth an alien first-contact scenario that my readers find very plausible, some even wondering aloud if this could be our current reality.

Let’s imagine that elsewhere in the galaxy a species elevated itself from the primordial soup a million years ahead of us. Making the most of that thousand-millennia head start, they master physics, achieve faster than light (FTL) travel, and populate thousands of star systems.

Always looking for burgeoning technological societies to bring into the galactic government, they populate the galaxy with a network of detectors designed to watch for certain markers thought to be key indicators, i.e.: unnaturally organized radio waves or light waves (laser beams) and unnatural fission reactions (nuclear detonations). Some, like radio waves, would probably just be annotated for future research. Others, like nuclear detonations, would require a more urgent investigation.

While they’ve mastered FTL travel and communications, their sensors are still limited to detecting occurrences at the speed of light. In other words, if a burgeoning society starts blasting radio waves or nuclear electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) across the cosmos, our curious aliens wouldn’t detect it until the wave traveled at the speed of light to the nearest sensor. Then it could use their FTL sub-space communication network to pass on the news.

To comprehend the logistics involved, we must have a full appreciation of the galaxy’s size. It’s a BIG galaxy. If our curious aliens only wanted to deploy ten million sensors, they would have to disperse them throughout the galaxy on a grid with one-hundred light-year spacing. The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across and one thousand light-years thick. That means if you could travel across the entire width of the galaxy at the speed of light, the Earth would circle the Sun 100,000 times during your trek. (Note: these are external observations. The hypothetical FTL traveler would experience this time quite differently, but that’s a subject for a future blog.) Even if you could travel at an incredible 100,000 times the speed of light, an Earth year would pass in the time it took you to traverse the galaxy.

When it comes to jaunting about the Milky Way, your FTL travel would have to be SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the speed of light to be of any appreciable use. Scientist and sci-fi writers often employ wormholes due to their hypothetical ability to fold space. Joining two points of space-time, like folding a paper in half, brings two remote locations together, rendering interstellar travel as simple as stepping through a door.

Back to our first contact scenario. Because of the aforementioned galactic scale, our fictional aliens have quite a few (read: ten million) sensors spread throughout the Milky Way. One day, they receive a signal indicating that a nuclear device detonated on a planet in the remote portion of the galaxy identified as SECTOR 64. They discover the signal originated from a medium-sized rocky planet in a solar system only two light-years from the sensor. (That would be very fortuitous, remember our one-hundred light-year spacing.)

So our curious aliens fold space-time and dispatch a scout ship to SECTOR 64. Arriving only a few days after their sensor detected the first nuclear blast, they get to the planet the locals (humans) call Earth in a year the humans have designated as one thousand nine hundred and forty-seven or 1947. Because of the sensor’s two light-year distance from the planet, two Earth years have passed since their original nuclear detonations in 1945.

Our curious alien scouts travel to the only place on the planet where they detect nuclear weapons. It happens to be relatively close to where the first nuclear detonation occurred. The humans call the region New Mexico.

In 1947 only one nuclear-armed bomber squadron existed, the 509th Bomber Group based at an Army Air Corp Base known as Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).

Yep, you guessed it. That’s near an infamous small town named Roswell, New Mexico.

In a tragic accident, the scout ship is knocked down by a surprisingly powerful thunderstorm.

After a series of nearly calamitous events, the aliens do make first-contact with world leaders of the day.

In Part I, I laid out the plausible alien first contact scenario that forms the backstory of my novel, SECTOR 64: Ambush. As promised at the end of that post, I’m back to postulate how things would pan out post-contact.

Given the premise that this alien species/society is extremely advanced and has been at the business of heading the galactic government for unknown millennia, we have to assume that this isn’t their first rodeo. They’ve initiated first contact with hundreds if not thousands of burgeoning societies across the galaxy. Through trial and error, they’ve perfected this process.

So when they stumbled into another race in a backwoods portion of the galaxy, galactic sector number 64, they made first contact. Once the contactees adjusted to the news, the galactic ambassadors briefed them on the two underlying facts of the galactic integration program:

It is a decades-long program designed to streamline your society, governments, and economy for galactic integration.

Secrecy is paramount. Why? The galactic government refined the process through thousands of iterations. During previous transitions, the political, economic, and social implications of premature disclosure regularly created unacceptable hardships on the integrating populations. If everybody knows of the transition, then all the time and energy invested in softening the socio/economic blow will be for naught. In short, disclosure defeats the purpose of a phased integration.

Here are the stipulations the ambassadors named for galactic integration:

The world’s governments must conform to galactic standards. In my fictional book, this ties into the gradual worldwide shifts toward an economic and cultural center. Examples include the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent Capitalization/Democratization of its member nations, the gradual transition of China away from strict communism, and the social reforms of the West.

The phased shift of economies away from a fossil fuel energy base. Our continued and growing fossil fuel dependence highlights the fictional nature of my scenario. Our economy is getting more, not less intertwined in them. In my fictional scenario, the galactic powers instruct Earth governments to push a phased introduction of alternate energy solutions.

Wait, are we talking fiction or reality?

This alien first contact scenario is merely the premise or backstory of my novel; it is not the meat and potatoes of the story.

The Indie Publishing School of Hard Knocks

Do indie authors need editors? Read on.

I released my first book in 2011, a novella that briefly rose to the top of Amazon’s sci-fi charts. In 2013, it was a third prize recipient in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. The novella, SECTOR 64: Coup de Main, garnered many five-star reviews, but rightfully, it also earned a few negative appraisals.

I sharpened my trade while working on book two of the two-book series, and it became apparent that my first effort did not deliver the polish and finish I initially thought. Essentially, I was that guy, the guy traditional publishers pointed at when berating the indie publishing world. If you did a Wiki search of the indie publishing stereotype, you’d likely have found my smiling mug at the top of the article. I never imagined I’d be that guy, but there I was, putting out a book that passed all the MS Word grammar checks, but nonetheless presented a myriad of amateur errors.

When I earned my military pilot wings, it was with the assistance of numerous professional instructors and extensive training. When I built my custom motorcycle, I sought out professional assistance, and now, building an airplane, I tap my pre-pilot history as a helicopter mechanic and the knowledge base of various professionals throughout the industry. However, when I finished my novella, I didn’t think I needed a professional editor.

I was wrong.

The Algebraic Curve

As I soon discovered, the road to literary excellence is an algebraic curve; it is a constant struggle to push the line of progress ever closer to that elusive goal. When authors go it alone, that curve takes exponentially longer to reach the same area code as the axis of perfection.

After a not insignificant amount of soul searching, I paid heed to those few negative reviews and read between the lines of some of the other, less glowing ones. I halted work on book two, reopened the source files for my first book, and hired a professional editor.

From his inputs as well as the feedback from various reviewers, I formulated a plan. In addition to its mechanics, my book’s characters needed further development. For instance, my main female character, Air Force Captain Sandra Fitzpatrick, plays a huge role in book two, but in book one, I had Sandy, an elite fighter pilot, sitting on her thumb while aliens attack.

With editorial assistance, I rewrote the entire story, fleshed-out the characters, cleaned up the writing, and threw some aliens at the West Coast, sending Sandy after them. Developing her storyline and character afforded me the opportunity to develop the other protagonists through her eyes.

The new material, characters, and scenes more than doubled the size of the original book. In the process, the 52,000-word novella grew into SECTOR 64: Ambush, a 108,000-word full-length novel.

Do Indie Authors Need Editors? Hell yeah!

The Path

Along the way, I filled my writer’s toolbox with techniques and tools that vastly improved my prose. For instance, once you have that sentence, paragraph, or scene just the way you want it, use your device’s text-to-speech feature to have it read said prose back to you. Echoing headwords stand out, and the computer will not glean over typos or missing words. Additionally, it highlights clunky sentences, the ones that require multiple passes for full comprehension, the ones that yank readers from a story like a stick jammed in the spokes of a speeding bicycle. When spoken aloud by your computer, a sentence that sounded perfect to your mind’s ear may suddenly sound clunky. This technique dramatically improved the flow of my writing, eliminating the literary tripping hazards.

Once I had the scene edited and flowing, I loaded it into Grammarly’s grammar checker as a final stopgap. It is a premium service and well worth the price. Over a period of months, the status of scene after scene cycled from Revised Draft to Final Draft, until finally, the last of ninety scenes crossed the finish line. Then, I handed my editors a vastly improved manuscript.

Before I started the rewrite, when my first editor went through the book, the errors were so ubiquitous, he was unable to do a granular editorial pass. It limited him to pointing out the basic mechanics missing throughout the manuscript and making general suggestions on character and story development. More than a year later—and due to scheduling conflicts, with a new editor—the process was painless. The manuscript progressed smoothly and quickly into a finished novel.

The final result has reviewers comparing me and Ambush to the industry’s heavy-hitters.

“Dean M. Cole is without a doubt the next Dan Brown. Sector 64 is a book that you can’t put down.” — Amazon Reviewer

Even the hard knocking reviewers at Goodreads have awarded Ambush an average of 4.1 stars with over 70 ratings to date. (Coup de Main had 2.84—and still does, ouch.)

Audible published the audiobook version in November. Nationally recognized narrator Mike Ortego lent his voice to the project. You will know him as the voice from audiobooks and documentaries as well as commercials for Toyota, Kingsford Charcoal, Coke Zero, and more. As production drew to a close, Mike told me, “It’s been a joy to be a part of your fine book,” and “You got a great talent, bud,”—immensely rewarding sentiments from a nationally known professional.

In December, IndieReader awarded it five stars and named Ambush a Best of 2014.

“SECTOR 64: AMBUSH is an engaging book from the very first page to the final words of the epilog.”—IndieReader

…Not as I Did

Please forgive the horn-blowing. I only mention those accolades because they leave me asking: What if I had done it right the first time? Where would I be today if I had not rushed my manuscript to market, had not ruined a good story with an amateurish presentation?

I certainly would not be fighting the uphill battle of countering a bad first impression.

So, do indie authors need editors?

Hell yeah!

Do as I say, not as I did the first time. Learn from my mistakes.

Don’t be that guy or girl.

About the Author:

Dean M. Cole, a world traveler and commercial helicopter pilot, writes from locales as remote as Equatorial Guinea and romantic as Paris’ Champs-Elysées with his trusty sidekick and beautiful wife, Donna. A combat veteran, he flew Apache Attack Helicopters in the US Army’s First Cavalry Division.

SECTOR 64: Ambush (Available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. Find the audiobook on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon.)

It’s 2015. Friendly extraterrestrials JUST found us. So why have the enemies of these benevolent aliens HATED humans for millennia?

X-Files meet Independence Day when incredible events thrust Air Force Captains Jake Giard and Sandra Fitzpatrick into a decades-old conspiracy to integrate humanity into a galactic government. Then, the plan renders present-day Earth a pawn in an extraterrestrial civil war. Wading through looters and apocalyptic infernos, can Sandy save her family? Can Jake save humankind?